Unfortunately, however, too many students are coming home from school deflated, defeated, and disillusioned.

Why?

The high-stakes testing season is in full swing.

What are high-stakes tests?

Tests are considered high-stakes when they are tied to major consequences, such as graduation.

But this year’s season is anything but business as usual. Instead, we are experiencing the largest revolt against high-stakes testing ever, as historic numbers of families from New York to Seattle opt their children out, refusing to subject them to what is too often education at its worst.

In fact, one recent study showed that students who fail exams linked to graduation are 12.5% more likely to be incarcerated.

Maybe your child does not the fit the profile for such sifting and will unlikely land in jail. Maybe your bank account indicates that your child is destined to wear a high-test score with pride.

Unfortunately, in allowing that outfit, you are colluding with a system that perpetuates inequality, inequality that comes color-coded.

2. High-Stakes Tests Hijack and Derail Student Learning

Color-coded sifting begins early, when children should be learning through play, not multiple-choice bubbles. But in the world of high-stakes testing, play becomes a privilege denied to many Black and Brown children.

And though the SBAC website has a whole page devoted to supporting “under-represented students,” many low-income students who rely on their computer lab or library for computer access are denied entry because the spaces are reserved for testing, ultimately increasing inequities.

In contrast, students in the advanced tracked classes – overwhelmingly White and wealthy – sometimes have the (White) privilege to skip entirely standardized tests (though not high-stakes ones) that fill up the computer lab’s schedule for weeks of the standard 180-day school year.

Nevertheless, Washington State is currently demanding that tens of thousands of juniors take the SBAC, even though it won’t affect their graduation in its inaugural year (turning the high-stakes test, for many, into an expensive no-stakes waste of time).

The students who will take this year’s tests are a completely different group from those who will take it next year. Thus, one year the test scores might indicate a teacher is “highly effective,” and the next year, a new group of students’ scores might indicate a struggling teacher.

Did such a teacher suddenly lose skills over one year?Of course not.

Edward Haertel of Stanford University says using tests scores to evaluate teachers is “sorting mostly on noise” because of the tests’ unreliability and inconsistency.

Because low-test scores track with poverty rates, teachers of poor students and students of Color are more likely to be rated ineffective and forced out. As a result, their students’ educations will be disrupted by a revolving door that deposits inexperienced teachers in their classrooms yearly.

Thus, high-stakes testing encourages interruption and disruption for the very same students who need continuity and stability the most.

And, again, even if your child is not attending a school likely to be closed, your taxpayer dollars are still supporting this movement.

5. High-Stakes Testing Squanders Millions

The price tag for these tests that have proven to be so damaging is about the only thing decadent about public education.

SBAC pegs the cost of each test at $27.30 per student, a seemingly low price. This low number looks a little different when you consider that last year in Washington State there were about 82,500 10th graders.

That’s a price tag of $2,252,250 – for just one grade. These tests are also slated for all students in grades 3-8 in states that have signed on to them.

As teacher Jesse Hagopian has pointed out, the same wealthy elite who orchestrate the proliferation of high-stakes testing have opted out their own children by sending them to private schools, which never have to waste time on state standards and high-stakes tests.

Instead, these expensive private schools have the privilege to create meaningful and authentic assessments. Such assessments don’t need to be limited to the elite, however. Some of these have been developed by the public, high-achieving New York Performance Standards Consortium, which has been waiving standardized tests since 1997.

These are the assessments we all should demand. These are the assessments all children deserve.

There’s a revolution afoot. Which side are you on?

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Jon Greenberg is a Contributing Writer for Everyday Feminism. He is an award-winning public high school teacher in Seattle who has gained broader recognition for standing up for racial dialogue in the classroom — with widespread support from community — while a school district attempted to stifle it. To learn more about Jon Greenberg and the Race Curriculum Controversy, visit his website, citizenshipandsocialjustice.com. You can also follow him on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter @citizenshipsj.

Gerardine Carroll, a National Board Certified Teacher, has 26 years of experience in both Catholic and public schools. In addition, she served as an adjunct instructor for six years in the School of Education at Seattle University.

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5 comments

Another indirect connection to social justice, more clearly “educational injustice,” is the narrowness of standardized testing in terms of students’ diverse intelligences. Using Gardner’s 10 intelligences as a framework, standardized testing leaves most abilities untested, and so most kids behind. The question of whether racial minorities are generally more attuned to non-logical/literal intelligence gets on sensitive territory, but i think from an anthropological perspective it is clear that musical intelligence and kinesthetic intelligence are central to african american culture. In any case, the tests measure the great expanse of student abilities through a very narrow, and one could say, arbitrary standard.

Fact is, cultures do differ and, collectively, more fully develop one or another intelligence by their lifestyles, values and practices. The main point is standardized testing completely misses the abilities of possibly the majority of kids, whoever they may be.